Akraino

When grappling with the enormity of IoT platforms, a sort of herd mentality has emerged, leading scores of vendors to create unique IoT platforms. But the problem is, no single IoT platform can accommodate all potential enterprise and industrial IoT use cases, according to Jason Shepherd, former chair of the EdgeX Foundry governing board. So organizations can become overwhelmed by the complexity of platform integration on the one hand or creating a platform from scratch on the other, Shepherd said. “I liken it to a riptide current. Your natural inclination is to swim into the current, but you risk drowning if you do that,” added Shepherd, who is the IoT and edge chief technology officer at Dell Technologies. “What you’re supposed to do, which is not intuitive, is to swim sideways.”

The EdgeX Foundry was created to sidestep the IoT platform battles. “While most people were trying to create their own platforms, we went open,” Shepherd said. “We swam sideways. And that’s what’s actually going to win.”

The EdgeX Foundry recently announced growing momentum with its latest release, known as “Edinburgh.” The product of a global ecosystem, Edinburgh is the latest example of the EdgeX Foundry’s open source microservices framework. The approach enables users to plug and play components from a growing number of third-party offerings.

In other LF Edge–related news, LF Edge’s Akraino Edge Stack initiative launched its first release in June to establish a framework for the 5G and IoT edge application ecosystem. Known as Akraino R1, it brings together several edge disciplines and offers deployment-ready blueprints.

Kandan Kathirvel, a director at AT&T and Akraino technical steering committee chair, invokes the early days of cloud computing to explain the mission behind the initiative. “In cloud computing, one of the pain points many users had when deploying the cloud was integrating multiple open source projects together,” Kathirvel said. “A user might need to work with hundreds of different open source communities.” And after deploying a cloud project, sometimes gaps were evident. Many organizations found themselves individually in this situation without realizing other users were essentially doing the same. “And this situation increases the cost and deployment time.”

Read more about EdgeX Foundry’s Edinburgh release and Akraino Edge Stack’s R1 release in this IoT World Today article here.

DockerHub is the world’s largest library and community for container images. It offers a huge repository for storing container images and it is available world wide. It can automatically build container images from GitHub and Bitbucket and push them to Docker Hub. These are just a few of the features it provides, but maybe one of the best features is that it offers seamless support for multi arch images through fat manifest.

Why Docker Hub is recommended for Multi-Arch

Docker Hub registry is able to store manifest list (or fat manifests). A manifest list acts as a pointer to other images built for a specific architecture thus making it possible to use the same name for images that are built on hardware with different architectures.

In the picture above akraino/validation:k8s-latest is the fat manifest, and its name can be used to reference both images akraino/validation:k8s-amd64-latest and akraino/validation:k8s-arm64-latest. Inspecting the manifest offers the details on what images it has, for what hardware architecture and what OS.

Figure 2: Docker fat manifest details

How does it work?

When building an image for a specific arch, the arch is added in the tag of the image (akraino/validation:k8s-amd64-latest and akraino/validation:k8s-arm64-latest).

After the images are pushed in the Docker Hub repo, the manifest can be created from the two images. Its name will be the same as the two images but with the arch removed from the tag (akraino/validation:k8s-latest).

To do this in CI with Jenkins, the Jenkins slave has to have docker and a couple of other LF tools installed. The connection to Docker Hub is done through LF scripts (see releng-global-jjb for more info) and all you need to do is define the jjb jobs .

In the figure below, the main Jenkins job (validation-master-docker) triggers two parallel jobs that build and push into the Docker Hub registry the amd64 (akraino/validation:k8s-amd64-latest ) and arm64 (akraino/validation:k8s-arm64-latest ) images. At the end, the fat manifest (akraino/validation:k8s-latest ) is done in a separate job.

When pulling the image, the name of the manifest is used (akraino/validation:k8s-latest); the correct image will be pulled based on the architecture of the host from which the pull is made.

Figure 4: Pulling a docker image from two different hardware architecture servers using the same name

What’s next

Docker Hub has been integrated in LF projects like OPNFV from the beginning and is now integrated in Akraino too, so other open source projects can refer to this successful experience to integrate Docker Hub in their pipeline.

The Akraino community was proud to announce the availability of its release 1 on June 6th. The community has experienced extremely rapid growth over the past year, in terms of both membership and community activity: Akraino includes broad contributions from across LF Edge, with 60% of LF Edge’s 60+ members contributing to project, as well as several other developers across the globe.

Before Akraino, developers had to download multiple open source software packages and integrate/test on deployable hardware, which prolonged innovation and increased cost. The Akraino community came up with a brilliant way to solve this integration challenge with the Blueprint model.

An Akraino Blueprint is not just a diagram; it’s real code that brings everything together so users can download and deploy the edge stack in their own environment to address a specific edge use case. Example use cases include IoT gateway, MEC for connected car, and a RAN intelligent controller that enables 5G infrastructure.

The Blueprints address interoperability, packaging, and testing under open standards, which reduces both overall deployment costs and integration time by users. The Akraino community will supply Blueprints across the LF Edge portfolio of projects, with plans to address 5G, IoT and a range of other edge use cases.

The key strength of the Akraino community is the well-defined process to welcome new Blueprints, new members, users and developers. The technical community is comprised of a Technical Steering committee (TSC), which consists of representatives from across member companies. The TSC acts as a “watchdog” to set process, monitor the community, and ensure open collaboration. In addition to the TSC, the Akraino community has seven sub-committees focused on much-needed areas such as security, edge APIs, CI and validation labs, upstream collaborations, documentation, process and community. Regular meetings are scheduled to ensure broader collaboration and accelerate progress on the various projects. The community calendar can be found here. It is not necessary to be a member to join the community calls, we invite anyone interested in learning more to join!

The above picture illustrates the primary use of Akraino R1 Blueprints and its targeted deployment areas. The release 1 Blueprints cover everything from a larger deployment in a telco-based edge cloud to a smaller deployment, such as in a public building like a stadium. Each Blueprint is validated via community standards on real physical lab hardware, hosted by either the community or the users.

Akraino Edge Stack prides itself on continuous refinement and development to ensure the success of Blueprints and projects. The community is already planning R2, which will include both new Blueprints and enhancements to existing Blueprints, tools for automated Blueprint validations, defined edge API’s, new community lab hardware, and much more. For future events and meetings please visit: https://wiki.akraino.org/display/AK/Akraino+TSC+Group+Calendar.

Creating a framework for defining and standardising APIs across stacks;

Akraino is part of the LF Edge organisation

Forget the expanding universe, for telcos it is all about the ever-expanding network edge, which just got a little bit bigger yesterday with the news that the Akraino open source project has published its first software release. Although it was only launched in February 2018, Akraino had a rich pedigree with seed code from AT&T and has enjoyed plenty of support during its short time under the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella.

Akraino Edge Stack, to give the project its full name, is focused on creating an open source software stack that supports a high-availability cloud stack optimised for edge computing systems and applications. It is being designed to improve the state of edge cloud infrastructure for enterprise edge, OTT edge, as well as telecoms edge networks. The project promises to give users new levels of flexibility to scale their edge cloud services quickly, to maximise the applications and functions supported at the edge, and to help ensure the reliability of critical systems.

“Akraino Release 1 represents the first milestone towards creation of a much-needed common framework for edge solutions that address a diverse set of edge use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the support of experts from all across the industry, we are paving the way to enable and support future technology at the edge.”

The Linux Foundation’s LF Edge project announced the first release of the Akraino Edge Stack with 10 “blueprints” for different edge computing scenarios. Also: LF Edge recently announced new members and the transfer of seed code from Zededa to Project EVE.

The Akraino Edge Stack project, which earlier this year was folded into the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella initiative for open source edge computing, announced the availability of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1 (Akraino R1). Last month, LF Edge announced new members and further momentum behind its Project EVE edge technology. More recently Linux Journal’s Doc Searls published a piece on the LF’s 5G efforts and argued for more grass-roots involvement in LF Edge (see farther below).

LF Edge marked the first release of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1, which is an open source software stack for edge computing systems and applications.

LF Edge is part of the Linux Foundation.

“Akraino R1 represents the first milestone towards creation of a much-needed common framework for edge solutions that address a diverse set of edge use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the support of experts from all across the industry, we are paving the way to enable and support future technology at the edge.”

Akraino is currently comprised of 11+ blueprint families with 19+ specific blueprints under development to support a variety of edge use cases.

LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation, announced the availability of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1, setting a framework to address 5G, IoT and a range of edge use cases.

LF Edge was first launched in January with a mission to create a unified open source framework for the edge. It started with more than 60 founding members and grew from there. At that time, Akraino Edge Stack was announced as one of its projects.

Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT at the foundation, said the Akraino project continues its momentum with operators’ network edge and the enterprise/IoT edge that emanates out of it.

Akraino Edge Stack, an open source edge computing project aimed at addressing telecom, enterprise, and industrial IoT use cases, is now available with 10 deployment-ready blueprints. The project, housed under the LF Edge group, is an open source software stack that is also designed to improve and expand the flexibility of edge cloud services in the 5G core, virtual radio access networks (vRAN), universal CPE (uCPE), SD-WAN, and carrier edge media processing.

“From a telco perspective we believe that there are three things that they’re extremely well equipped with, and that’s what differentiates the telcos in this world of edge,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of edge, IoT, and networking at Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation launched Akraino in early 2018, and it formed LF Edge in January as an umbrella group for its five open source edge computing projects.

The Linux Foundation wants to make it simpler for managed service providers (MSPs) to construct their own edge computing solutions using open source software. The LF Edge arm of the Linux Foundation announced the availability of a set of frameworks and validated reference architectures for build edge solutions, for everything from Internet of Things (IoT) environments to 5G wireless networking services based on the Akraino Edge Stack.

Officially launched last year, Release 1 of the Akraino Edge Stack provides access to more than 11 blueprint classes, with more than an additional 19 blueprints under development. Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking, automation, edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation, says that unlike other reference architectures, these blueprints are made up of declarative open source components and associated best practices. This makes it simpler to build, deploy, secure, and manage edge computing platforms.

There are almost as many open source groups and projects working on edge computing as there are definitions of edge — one such project, in fact, focuses exclusively on defining edge terms. This is partially due to the hype, and consolidation will probably happen as the hype turns into real-life deployments and concrete use cases.

We’re already seeing some signs of open source groups working together to solve edge challenges and take advantage of the opportunity it provides. The Linux Foundation and open standards body ETSI, for example, recently signed a memorandum of understanding to “bring open source and standards closer and foster synergies between them.” As it relates to edge, this means Akraino — which is the Linux Foundation’s open source edge software stack — will incorporate the ETSI Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) APIs directly into the stack.